informant38
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...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not...
Milton, Areopagitica

Except he had found the
standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
that quiets the desire even of praising it.

Jeffers, Meditation On Saviors


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12.10.03




Ω{Machiavelli's skulking around the Florentine chambers, the systole and diastole of money and blood which was the all and only of late 15th century biology. Always these guys leave out biology, always, which is why it's overemphasized here. It was sperm as much as name, gold as much as place, will as much as law, then as well as now. The papacy and the G7 of southern Europe just before the Columbian infusion. Florence as New York, as London. Money and the ability to hold on to it. Medici(Lorenzo)'s kid brother Guglielmo, gets finished in church, blood everywhere, but Lorenzo's alright. The most accurate reptilian response, the big cat's timed leap, all those millenia of cull and prosper, mutant invention tried and true. It works and works again. Taxes as whip and stock, exile as exile. The grief of the women packing, the stripped dignity of mercantile alphas reduced to selling things in a foreign city just to live. Palazio windows looking right down on the square in the heart of town. Machiavelli's in there somewhere, a kid, passed over but on full imprint. There was a bowl-game frenzy, the aftermath of quickly calculated revenge, desperate but thought-out, and the doers, the Pazzi's and their allies who couldn't fade back into obsequies, gifts, tribute, got done. And someone's heart was cut out and spontaneously, ceremonially, bitten into, and that act recorded deep enough it comes to us, in pop-scholarship, and historically accurate contemporary poetry.}

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